AlphaGo vs. Man = 3:0 – the dawn of AI?

June 2, 2017 | 07:00

The AlphaGo program from Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind beat the world's best go player Ke Jie 3-0 last month and also defeated a team of five Go Grandmasters. The game of Go was considered to be the last bastion where man's intuition and learning ability would dominate because of its complexity.
Transhumanism begins...

The AlphaGo program from Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind beat the world's best go player Ke Jie 3-0 last month and also defeated a team of five Go Grandmasters. The game of Go was considered to be the last bastion where man's intuition and learning ability would dominate because of its complexity.

So, the best human Go players were beaten by Google's AI software, it seems as though finally the last domino has fallen. There is probably no other game out there where a person would still be able to cope with a computer. It’s been 20 years now since IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess. The highly acclaimed yet often-derided promise of AI appears finally to have outgrown the hype. Or maybe not?

The age old boardgame of Go. Source: DeepMind

In any case, the three-year-old AI Company DeepMind has announced to that it will be retiring AlphaGo. That makes sense, in the world of board games, the battle between man and machine has finally been decided, we lost… The only challenge left would be for machines to battle each other but that would not be too interesting for us humans and it would be difficult to attract an audience to such a contest. The AI ​​know-how behind AlphaGo however will not be wasted. The knowledge acquired and human intellectual investment can be put to good use in other fields, such as health, energy and technology, because there will be more potential to make a profit.

If you combine the AI capability of AlphaGo with the navigation skills of modern autonomous cars, the predictions of Evolution 2.0 do not seem so far-fetched. Not far in the future now we will wake up to find that the day of the technological singularity has dawned. Some predictions point to somewhere between 2025 and 2035. To be on the safe side, just make sure you keep a careful eye on your computer-controlled lawn mower this summer…